


A Safe Place

by MoveTheUniverse



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Rated for future chapters, Slow Burn, mentioned that the other members of rogue one don't make it off scarif, things will heat up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 04:19:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16825000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoveTheUniverse/pseuds/MoveTheUniverse
Summary: Boba Fett was called in to save the two remaining members of the mission to Scarif. One of them, though, proves to be more trouble than he's worth, bringing up all the memories of a past romantic encounter.Cassian Andor was supposed to die on Scarif. Now, though, his new lease on life is not one he feels he deserves, especially not  from the the man he'd abandoned.Can the two heal each other, or will all the damage done to them by all they've faced destroy them?Rating is for later chapters





	A Safe Place

It takes three days for the man to speak. Three days of the endless drone of monitors measuring a too-weak heartbeat, of waiting for any sign of life, of applying bacta patches and anything else from Boba’s medical supplies that seem appropriate to whatever injury seems the most pressing. There’s so many wounds on the slender man, so many bruises and broken bones, trying to give him medical care feels a bit like trying to solder together a broken glass viewscreen. Messy and stupid and expensive.

Just like a broken viewscreen, too, Boba is sure the man will never be the same when, (or if) he ever wakes. Because it’s not the infection keeping him motionless, not now. It’s the apathy. Boba doesn’t need a monitor, beeping or not, to tell him the prone figure has given up. There’s no hope left in the man, no fight, which seems odd, given the amount of damage the man’s fighting had caused the Imperials on Scarif.

When the man does speak, it’s a single word. “Jyn.”

Boba doesn’t know the word. It’s not Galactic Basic, nor Huttese, nor any of the smattering of languages he’d collected over the years. Maybe it’s a name. Logic would tell him it’s probably the name of the other target, the one he’d collected at the same time. And if that’s the case, then the man might as well be calling out for a star to hold.

The woman’s long gone, lightyears away from where the Slave I was currently docked. And she certainly hadn’t said the man’s name before she’d left. Not, at least, that Boba could remember.

Of course, he doesn’t know the man’s name either. He knows enough to know that if he had once known it, he’d only known a lie.

“Jyn,” the man’s voice creaks again, more of an exhale than a real word.

But exhale or word, it’s a desperate sound. The sound of someone who has exactly one reason left to live. The sound of a man who loves someone.

Boba’s used to that sort of muttering from merchandise in the holding bay and does not reply. He simply returns to dressing the wound he’d been working on. It would be bad form to have merchandise die before it’s collected, he tells himself.

It would be worse form, he knows, to admit that someone else could do this task. Med droids are cheap enough, especially with how much his client paid. He’d been a backup plan, a last minute option, paid for by some wealthy member of the Rebel Alliance. Boba didn’t get details for the two pieces of hard merchandise he was tasked with collecting (not rescuing. That word was for people who called themselves heroes, who did jobs not for the simple goal of credits, but for something stupid like fame, or worse, belief in a better world). He’d just been told a location, and a description, and had gotten to work.

He’s good at that sort of work. He’s rubbish at this type. The bacta drips down his arm and onto the man’s stubbly cheek. Without thinking, he wipes it away. The brush of stubble against his hand makes his face flush hot under his helmet.

No. That’s ridiculous. He can’t feel the stubble through his gloved hand, any more than he could feel the warmth of the man’s skin. He can’t feel anything at all when he’s in his armor.

And that’s exactly where he’s staying, as long as the merchandise is going to remain in the holding bay. The armor keeps him safe in more ways than one. It grants him anonymity, protection, a shield.  
The one thing it cannot do, though, is dispel memories. No filtering tools on his viewscreen can remove the images that cross his mind. Of the brush of stubble against his chest, while warm lips kiss a trail down lower and lower. Lower than any one ever kissed him before.

Lower than he really knew he could be kissed.

Memories of a man’s sighing voice, all too much like that one word he’d just said. Though then, it hadn’t been _Jyn_ on his lips.

But it hadn’t been that man—no---that merchandise, _either._ He stresses the word to himself. That man is dead, and the person that man had touched is long gone too. Boba’s a different man now. An armored man. A protected one. Wrapped in metal and coldness and the duties of a bounty hunter.

Duties he’d been neglecting while he played nursemaid.

_Stay on task_ , Boba. He mutters, the way his father used to tell him. The little sayings he heard over and over in his youth had become his mantras in the long years he’d spent cold and hungry and desperate. (a small voice tells him he’d been a youth then, too, despite how the so-called justice system had treated him) Now, the mantras remain within him, a memory that remind him of how far he’d come… and how much he’d lost.

For one thing, his voice sounds less like Jango’s these days. More gravely. More tired. After all, his Dad had a home, a safe place on Kamino, for as long as he’d existed in Boba’s life. No matter how long the mission, Jango could come back to a place where he could sleep with both eyes closed.

Boba remembers the last time he felt safe when he was sleeping, and the memory makes him slam one gloved hand into the wall of his ship as he leaves the room. The metal resonates with the impact, and he doesn’t see the wounded man’s eyes flutter open for a moment, watching him.

* * *

The next day, Boba tries again to contact the person who’d bought his services.

Nothing. But there’s another 5,000 credits in his account. Someone wants the man alive, but out of sight. Wants him safely tucked away in whatever part of the Outer Rim that Boba chooses to hide away in. Of course. The man’s part of the insurgent group that styled themselves an alliance. _Kriffing_ idiots _._ As if trust between ragtag rebel groups is enough to label with such a strong word. As if their simple trust will hold them together when all their truths start to unravel. And they will. Because rebel officer or Imperial officer, they all will lie, when they want something they're not allowed to have.

The rebels have no idea what they’re up against. How easily the Empire can destroy things. How much power relishes the chance to conquer and quell uprisings. He’d seen the same hunger to dominate from the Jedi, only decades before.

Decades that felt like lifetimes.

But it’s good to remember that his client, and the injured merchandise on the bed (because he tries his damnest not to think of any of his targets as sentient beings. Easier that way. More efficient. Simpler) both are enemies to the government. Which probably means there’s a bounty on the merchandise’s head. And that would mean that a simple blood scan, loaded into his database, would reveal that useful information, and more beside. It could provide intel like a name, a location. A past.

It could provide all those things he should have known to look for the last time he'd met the man. Because it's harder by the hour to pretend it's someone else, a complete stranger slowly dying in the holding bay below him. Harder to pretend that the man is merchandise, is simply the aggregate sum of whatever credits he's worth.

Even though he'd had no probably seeing Boba as the same, if he was the same man.

Boba tells himself he’ll run the scan that in a few hours. After he’d checked on the merchandise’s wounds. After he’d had time to eat and enter a new hyperspace jump for the Slave I. They’d been changing paths often enough to ensure that they weren’t followed, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He ignores the small voice that whispered he could have done the database check at any time.

* * *

Boba Fett does not sleep that night. Not even the feline-like napping he usually does in his captain’s chair. No. He paces in the cockpit, before descending the ladder to check on the merchandise.

Twice.

Well. He tells himself it’s twice.

His other trips down to the holding bay are for more practical reasons, like checking the airlocks he’s been taught to keep sealed since before he could talk and getting his third and final flight suit out of storage.

He might need it.

Not that he ever does. He has one flight suit to wear, and one to wash. The third is simple luxury. The only sort of luxury he allows himself is that of extra efficiency. But, he decides that night, just maybe, it’s better to keep the suit with his other things. And if fetching it meant that he had to walk pass the merchandise, so be it.

It’s just good business practice to check the slow-beeping monitors for the prone figure’s vitals when he passes.

That’s all.

It’s all business.

He’ll get a transmission any day, a drop off point for this one to be deposited at, just like that hawk-bat of a woman (who had not only tried to claw his helmet when she’d woken, but bit his arm) had been deposited somewhere in the sands of Tatooine.

Somewhere rather close to the Sarlacc. He can’t help but hope she might stumble right into it, though he’s pretty sure she’d just give the thing indigestion.

He tells himself his dislike of her has nothing to do with the way the merchandise in his holding bay has said her name each time he’s stirred.

He tells himself that if he’s instructed to reunite the two, he will. For the credits, and for the contract.

* * *

Remembering his encounter with her, though, reminds him of the risks he faces on this job. Professional risks, not physical ones. The woman had only seen him for a flash of a second, enough time for him to spray a knock-out spray on her, before depositing her on Tatooine, as directed. If she remembered anything of their brief spar, it would be the flash of a visor, something her memory would easily translate into a Stormtrooper’s, given where he’d pulled the two from. She wouldn’t expect to have seen a Mandalorian’s helmet, if she even knew what one was.

She won’t remember him.

But the other one… when he finally wakes up, Boba’s going to be stuck with him for a little longer. He doesn’t think he can kill him, not if he wants to honor the job.

And he always honors the job. It’s the one thing he can do, the one truth he can live. If there’s a contract, he’ll complete it.

_Always._

It’s what he was taught to do.

It’s what he believes in.

It’s all he believes in.

So, Boba will just have to improvise. It’s something he’s gotten good at, though it’s not necessarily a skill he’d ever been taught by his Dad. Jango favored tried-and-true methods. The old way. The _Mando_ way. He’d been a traditionalist, though he would have scowled at that word, from his rough-spun shirts, to his gleaming, perfectly painted armor. Boba tried, at first, to maintain the paint detail on his own. But just opening one of the cans of paint he’d bought had lifted the lid on his memories too.

The dangerous sort of memories. Ones that sliced into him like razors, choked him like the whirling smog of Genosis, made him gasp, even inside the safety of his helmet. 

Yes, those memories were dangerous. They were the ones where life had been simple. Not because there had been rules and contracts, but because he’d been loved, and safe. Maybe that’s the worst kind of contract one can fall into, he muses. The contract of believing in a family. Believing that the good times will last.

As he muses, the memories start to swim past him, like the carnivorous fish he’d used to fear, when Kamino had been his whole world. Before he’d known how many other things there were to fear. Memories of reading a story out loud, his young voice stuttering over a particularly complex word (he’d always swapped _Leth_ and _Reth,_ a habit he still fell into. Luckily, it wasn’t as if he had many people to compose Aurbesh-lettered notes to. If he did send a written message, it was usually in Outer Rim Basic, and only because he really hated the alternative, of getting image-based holo-messages of Hutts. No matter how translucent the holo, he always felt they left a trail of slime in his otherwise spotless ship) while his father carefully retailed a bright swoop of blue on the gleaming silver helmet.

Memories like that were worse than taking a direct hit of spice. They’d send him reeling back into the past, and he’d fall, unmoored, into confusing thought he wanted to never have again. Thoughts that, like spice, could kill.

That time was over. Those feelings were gone. Better to keep a chipped helmet and a sharp mind than to drown himself in the past.

* * *

Safety was a luxury few could afford.

That was his life’s work, in a way. Proving to people that there was no price they could pay to protect themselves, no way of buying safety, not when someone else wanted to pay more to endanger them. How many times had a target begged for mercy, offered to pay double what he’d make hauling them in?

And he’d always, always turned down the offer.

It wasn’t just about the money (although that was certainly important) it was the principle of it all. The contract.

The promise.

Promises were important, too. He’d learned that before he could talk, too. Learned to listen, to believe. To trust. Why would he do anything else, when his father, his whole world, had made a promise? _I’ll be home soon, Boba_. The memory whispered, like a tiny crack in a hydraulic pipe, letting in the hiss of steam that will surely but slowly kill anyone stuck in the room. _You’ll be safe._

That promise, like so much else, had been a lie. But he still tried to follow the few truths he shared with Jango. The truth of the mission, the sacredness of the contract.

The contract that currently keeps the merchandise below him alive. Because Boba has no doubt that the Empire would pay double-triple-more- than the mysterious benefactor would for the man. He’s got no doubt there’s a bounty on his head, one that he would have been happy to fill.

Kriffing hell, he might have done the job without pay, just to make things _tidy_ again.

If he’d known the man was still alive.

If he knew he’d been even more a fool than he’d realized.

If he hadn’t trusted a promise that had shattered like ice caving to a booted foot, leaving him drowning in its chill.

He can’t lie to himself, this late at night, that the man isn’t the one and the same. Different name. Same face. Same hands, delicate and skilled.

Same voice.

_Jyn,_ the voice had begged.

But years before, it had been a different name that same voice called out. 

A name no more true than the one he’d given in return. But a name that had meant something to Boba, that night, and all the warm nights that followed.

It had been a long time since he’d used that name, and since he’d felt warm.

The memory surfaced This one, far more recent than most, accompanied, not by the smell of paint, but by the intimate scent of desire, and the tang of salt on his lips. Lips that had only just learned to kiss. Lips that had stayed silent, as someone else’s had whispered, _You’re safe. I’ve got you. We’ll be all right._

Boba yanks off his helmet, as if the memory played out on the screen beneath the visor. He throws it hard, away from him, with shaking hands. It smashes against the floor of the cockpit and bounces twice.

He stares down at his reflection in it. For a moment, it’s not the faded green helm he sees, but a gleaming silver one, with only the eyes of a terrified child glinting back in its visor. Boba lets out a steadying breath. The feelings are all too close now. The far past and the near past, both unwanted. Both full of warmth, of safety.

There’s nowhere to hide from the past, not on the ship that he now pilots, the same ship he used to watch take off, soaring away from his rain-streaked bedroom window, leaving him alone again.

Alone. The same way he’d been left, that night years ago. As soon as he’d gotten used to the warmth of sharing a bed, the press of body against body, the rush of pleasure and the slow fading bliss of falling asleep in another’s arms, that had vanished too. As surely as a ship leaping into hyperspace.

As silent as the fall of an empty helmet onto a muddy arena floor.

_You’re safe. I’ve got you. We’ll be all right._

Those words had been whispered to him, pressed like tattoos against the back of his neck, a place so intimate Boba hadn’t known anyone could touch him there. He hadn't known so many things, that night. 

He should have known, though, those words had all been lies.

There is no such thing as all right. No such thing as safety.

Not for Boba.

And not for the man sleeping in his holding bay.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ship for RarePairsExchange, and now I'm hooked. Comments welcome!


End file.
